Michelle Murrain's feed compendium

I did a kind of radical experiment a couple of weeks ago: I de-friended almost all of my nptech and client Facebook friends (cutting my friend count by more than 60%). I had a few reasons for this, and over the past couple of weeks that I’ve been living this experiment, it’s made me quite happy. Of course, everyone is still on Twitter, and Linked in, etc., so I still feel connected.

Even though I tend not to blog anywhere near as much as most of my colleagues about social networks (because it’s really not my passion,) I’ve been a fairly early adopter, in the broad sense (of course, if I compare myself to Beth Kanter, I’m a laggard.) I have an account on all of the major social networks (and some of the obscure ones, too,) listen often, and update fairly regularly. A while ago, I realized that I would keep hearing the same nonprofit technology related stuff, over and over again, and I realized I was contributing to that by using Ping.fm to send the same status notices everywhere, or connecting my twitter account to my facebook and linked in accounts, etc. (actually, I think it might even be possible to create an infinite loop doing that stuff.) I stopped doing that a while back.

Now of course it used to be that all of my Facebook “friends” were other nptech early adopters. But around two years ago, a steady stream of my real friends started to come on, and then about 40% of my Facebook friends were non-nptech related. I noticed two important things: first, a status notice that a real friend was having a hard time would get buried in the cacophany of new reports, new campaigns, new blog posts, etc. Not a good thing. Also, I noticed that I censored myself on Facebook – I wouldn’t say things to friends, or play games, or take silly quizzes because I felt the need to be “professional.”

So all of that lead me to make Facebook a “work-free” space. I left work-related groups, disconnected this blog from Facebook, etc.

And doing that led me to think a little bit about how we nonprofit technology leaders use these social networks, and how we work with our clients to use these services. I do think that still, the majority of nonprofit organizations aren’t all that connected to social networks. I’m not entirely utterly convinced yet that all of them should. And I do wonder about the echo effect – if you are an early adopter, and you are on multiple networks, you are going to hear the same stuff over and over. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Should we be suggesting that organizations tailor much more specifically their messages, rather than using the services that allow them (and us) to send the same updates everywhere at once?

The technology behind social network strategy and implementation is way more my bad than communications strategy, but this experiment has opened my eyes to some of the things we may be doing wrong. And, of course, there is an entirely interesting conversation to be had about the issues of work and personal life, but I’ll save that for my other blog.

pearlbear posted a photo:

pearlbear posted a photo:

pearlbear posted a photo:

pearlbear posted a photo:

pearlbear posted a photo:

pearlbear posted a photo:

I spent a big chunk of my day dealing with a project that is, in no uncertain terms, a trainwreck. The client has sunk a ton of money into a product which is in, its current (first phase supposedly finished) state, unusable (client and vendor shall remain unnamed.) My role in the project has been strategic and as a liason, not technical, which to some extent gives me a bit of a distanced view.

Web development trainwrecks are, sadly, far from isolated cases – they happen all the time, even when all of the parties have good intentions. And as someone who is building a business around doing this sort of work, it is of keen interest to me as to why some projects end up in the state that this project is in, and I want to make sure to avoid these kinds of situations. So how do we avoid trainwrecks? Some trainwrecks we can see coming miles away, but yet we are in complete denial about them. Some trainwrecks are like sudden derailments – it’s not at all clear where it comes from. But I think all trainwreck projects have the seed of the wreck somewhere in the history of the project.

The hallmarks of this particular trainwreck were so clear, that in retrospect, they scream out at me:

• Lack of transparency about development process
• Lack of transparency about cost implications of increased scope
• Waterfall development process (well, the vendor said they practiced Agile, but in practice, it’s been waterfall)

As a practitioner of the Agile development process (we use a somewhat modified form of Scrum, in particular,) I’m beginning to really see the value of this kind of process. It makes visible all sorts of things that are often hidden. It seems like the Agile methodology helps in a number of ways:

• Once educated, clients have a window into the development process. They know what small chunks of development are going to happen in a given time interval, and they know what they will get at the end of that time interval
• Things are developed in priority order
• Clients can critique things early
• New functionality becomes a part of the “product backlog” and it is easier to have clarity about what is and is not within scope

Of course, it is theoretically possible to be completely transparent in a traditional waterfall methodology, and completely opaque using Agile, but I do think that the Agile methodology makes it way more difficult to be opaque. But it also takes some work and education of clients unfamiliar with the methodology (as well as making mistakes along the way on our part as developers.)

And I’ve been able to watch this process work well, not only with our own projects, but also with a project I was a strategic lead on. I was pretty skeptical a year or so ago, but now I’m sold. And since transparency has always been something of real importance to me, a development process that encourages transparency is a good thing.

As you can tell, I haven’t had much time to blog lately. Here are some great links I’ve come across that I thought were worth sharing:

• Get the NTEN IT Staffing and Spending Report. Good stuff!
• Take a peek at Google Wave. This is a great preview of some really fascinating technology
• Learn about the state of MySQL – it’s an interesting read. It includes info about MariaDB, a fork of MySQL from one of the founders.
• Wolfram|Alpha – a geeks dream computational search engine
• Best practices and examples for nonprofit web design from Smashing Magazine

Dr. George Tiller from Wichita Kansas, a physician who performed legal late-term abortions, often when a woman’s life or health was at risk, was shot and killed in church this morning. This is the most recent in a very long history of attacks and murders of physicians who perform abortions.

I have read varied comments on varied blogs today where people have been suggesting that this was a good thing. And I will be far from surprised if the person who is finally charged and convicted for this crime thought they were doing God’s will. What I can never figure out is how it is that people who consider themselves followers of Jesus ever find violence acceptable? I’m reminded of the post that I wrote last fall on Evangelicals and Torture. We progressive Christians are supposedly known for tossing out parts of the Bible we don’t like. My question is “what part of “thou shalt not kill” don’t you understand?” No wonder the new athiests (and others) think Christianity sucks.

And of course, like the gay marriage debate, the Biblical evidence for the idea that life begins at conception is not especially clear (it is symbolic language about God forming us in the womb,) nor are there any proscriptions against abortion in the Bible. And yet, the clearest messages from Jesus were along the lines of “love your enemy as you love yourself,” which, in the parlance of one of my favorite bumper stickers, means probably not killing them.

As a society and democracy, we have decided that when life begins is a matter for science to determine, and whether to end a pregnancy before then is a matter for a woman to decide for herself. As a fellow progressive faith blogger put it “democracy does not have an opt-out option.”

I have a friend who has a blog (called Recipes for Trouble), that intertwines life and food in a really cool way. Sometimes, since I love to discover new foods to cook, I think I’ll share them here, but I never have. Until today.

Ruth and I had a friend over for lunch, so we took the occasion as an opportunity to go to the farmer’s market that happens in downtown Oakland (at Jack London Square) on Sundays. I still can’t get used to the fact that I can get in-season fruits and vegetables at times like this, when in New England, pretty much all there is are fiddleheads, some greens, asparagus and snap peas. We got all sorts of peppers and herbs. We got two huge bunches of Thai Basil, summer squash, a lot of berries of varied sorts (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries…)

We came home, and cooked up some Rice Noodles with Thai Basil Pesto, Summer Squash and Goat Cheese, and a Mixed Berry and Mint Salad (recipes below.) As we cooked, and was oohing and aahing over our great bounty, I was remarking about how California was “Foodie Heaven.”

We had a really nice time - our friend had spent the year on spiritual sabbatical, spending time at reatreat spaces, monasteries and the like all over the world for a year, so we had a really rich time talking about all that had happened to all of us since we’d last seen each other. Ruth and I had a fun time cooking (we love cooking for people - invite yourself over sometime!)

Rice Noodles with Thai Basil Pesto

• Rice Noodles (the kind that come in a plastic package from an Asian Grocery)
• Thai Basil
• Garlic
• Salt
• Coconut Oil (optional)
• Olive Oil (or some other kind of oil)
• Peanuts

Boil some water, and place the rice noodles in the boiling water, and let them cook (a little al dente). While the water is boiling, put cloves of garlic and basil and oil in a blender or food processor, and blend until smooth. Salt to taste. Once the noodles are done, take them out and drain them, and rinse them lightly, returning them to the pot. Add in the pesto, and toss. Move the noodles with pesto into a bowl, and top with chopped peanuts.

Summer Squash and Goat Cheese

• Red Onion
• Summer Squash
• Patty Cake Squash
• Long Beans (Asian version of string beans - but you can use regular string beans)
• Goat cheese (soft flakey kind)
• Rosemary
• Olive Oil
• Salt

Sautee red onion in olive oil, add both kinds of squash and saute until close to done. Add long beans, rosemary and salt, and saute until beans are tender. At the very end, add goat cheese, stir quickly, and turn off the flame. Serve immediately.

Mixed Berry and Mint Salad

• Strawberries
• Blueberries
• Raspberries
• Blackberries
• Goat Cheese
• Mint
• Sugar

Place a layer of mint leaves at the bottom of a bowl. Add mixed berries until full. In a blender, mix goat cheese, mint leaves, sugar and some water. Blend until smooth. Drizzle fruit.

I don’t have kids, but I do know how young kids ask questions. They are innocent, and free of assumptions, and keep asking “why?” In the end, the poor adults either get tired of the questions, or realize that there are assumptions they’ve been making for all this time that might actually be worth questioning.

Human processes mold around software. We see this all the time. A CRM gives you these 5 canned reports, and you get used to making do with what’s there. A legacy client database requires a certain order of data entry, and your intake forms have been produced to copy that order. Your email software has particular limitations, and you find behavioral workarounds.

What’s also true in the realm of customized software, is that software is molded around people. You put in your RFP that a package spit out data in X,Y and Z ways because your ED is used to data in that form (maybe because a package they had at their previous organization had those canned reports.) You have a requirement that data be entered into the system in one particular way, probably because that’s the way you’ve always done it. Sometimes, you feel the need to replicate a process that the person 3 administrative assistants ago put in place that was molded around their particular limitations, just because that’s what you know.

When you are undergoing the process of creating or implementing a new system of any sort, whether it be a CMS for a website, a CRM, some internal system, it is a really good exercise to be like a 3 year-old, and keep asking “why?” Why do we need this feature? Why will this report be important? Why should the software work this way? Once you peel the layers down to the bottom, you’ll either have “we don’t know” or “because we believe it will help us meet our mission in this specific way.”  Then you know what you should take, and what you can leave behind.

I got to spend one day at CiviCRM developer camp this week. Unfortunately, it came after 4 long days of conferencing, after many exhausting days of work, so I wasn’t at my peak. But I learned a lot, and thought I’d share some of what I took away from that day.

First, the core team shared some of the new stuff coming out in version 2.3, and it is awe-some. One of the major reasons CiviCRM gets dinged as a CRM/DMS is that it doesn’t have reports. Well, that problem is about to go away with the release of CiviReport in 2.3. There will be a number of canned reports, and some really nice ways to create reports. Plus charts! Yay! There were some pie charts, and regular bar charts. I don’t have the new svn trunk of CiviCRM installed, otherwise, I’d show some screenshots, but it looked really nice. (I’ll be installing CiviCRM from svn in the next week, and I’ll probably blog more as 2.3 develops.)

There are some really nice usability improvements coming up in 2.3 as well – to make the basic contact pages much easier to navigate. And there is a new menu system, which will make things a lot easier. And, for Drupal users, some sweet Views 2 and CCK integration.

CiviEvent is getting waiting lists, registration approval, and user-modifiable registrations, and some other improvements.

The Alpha of 2.3 should be out by July.

I also learned about CiviCase, which is actually present in 2.2. I saw the example of it used for the Physician Health Program in Canada. It’s quite good, and there are some useful docs to see it at work on the CiviCRM wiki. I’d love to find an organization, such as a small human services organization, in need of case management software, that could use CiviCase – it would be a great, and relatively inexpensive alternative to current offerings out there. And more organizations using CiviCRM for case management would help CiviCase get even better.

I also dug into some of the internals and code of CiviCRM, and feel better equipped to start contributing more than ideas and feedback to the project.

NTC is coming, and I don’t have to pack! That’s a good thing. But I will be BARTing my way into SF everyday, from Saturday for Penguin Day, Sunday through Tuesday for NTC, and Wed and Thursday for CiviCRM Developer Camp. I’m very much looking forward to all of it, even though it seems like it’s going to be an exhausting 6 days.

I’d love to meet new folks and see as many old friends as possible, so I figured I’d share where I’ll be during these days, and perhaps we can meet up. You can email me, @pearbear on twitter, or give me a text message or call … if you know my cell, that is. :-)

• Saturday: Penguin Day!
• Saturday evening: NTEN Board Dinner
• Sunday morning: NTEN Board meeting
• Sunday afternoon: Torn between Drupal for Good and Google APIs (somehow, there seems a lesson there.)
• Sunday evening: Science Fair and reception
• Monday morning, way, way too early: Convio Partner Breakfast
• Monday Morning:Clay Shirky’s Plenary, and the debut of Holly’s version of “Put a ring on it.” I can’t wait!
• Monday 10:30: Open Source CRM session (David Geilhufe is moderating, yours truly is a speaker)
• Monday 1:30: So you want to be a consultant… (Robert Weiner is organizing a great group of consultant types, including me.)
• Monday Evening: Afterparty @Mezzanine
• Tuesday morning: Gotta hear Eben Moglen!
• Tuesday 10:30: Open Source CMS (Laura Quinn’s got that one. I’m just going to be in the peanut gallery. Update: She roped me in to participate, so I’ll be answering questions…)
• Tuesday 3:30: So you want to be a consultant, part II
• Wed – Thursday: CiviCRM Developer Camp
• Friday: Collapse

In general, the activities of the big tech corporations have somewhat limited and indirect effect on nonprofit technology. For large enterprises, the activities of the big players is a much more immediate and important set of issues to deal with. For us, it’s generally much more removed.

However, today’s news that Oracle is going to buy Sun Microsystems has some very important implications. Why? It has to do with the fact that many, many nonprofit websites and web applications are built using MySQL, the most popular open source database management system. Sun bought MySQL AB (the company behind MySQL) last year for $1 Billion dollars, and therefore, MySQL AB now becomes a part of Oracle, it’s primary competition.

There is some suspicion that there may be anti-trust challenges because of this, but if it goes through, it raises some huge questions about what happens to MySQL because of this. Of course, since MySQL is open source, there is no danger of MySQL going away, someone can always fork it. And, ultimately there is a great open source database alternative called PostgreSQL, but support for it is not universal. However, the future of ongoing support and development for MySQL is certainly in question. Most nonprofits don’t get any support from MySQL AB directly, but larger organizations that might have been getting some support might see changes down the road.

It’s something that those of us who depend on MySQL for our web development projects will be watching quite closely.

I’ve been a fan of Darwin’s ever since I read On the Origin of Species when I was a kid. I’ve even read parts of Steven J Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. I think there aren’t really a whole lot more interesting scientific theories around (well, OK, I’ve become a recent fan of non-locality.) A while back, a couple of articles piqued my interest. The first was a story about a “scientific” study, which seems to suggest that:

… our minds are conflicted, making it so we have trouble reconciling science and God because we unconsciously see these concepts as fundamentally opposed, at least when both are used to explain the beginning of life and the universe.

I spent a good bit of time as a scientist teaching about issues related to how scientists think about a topic can influence how they ask questions, and how they analyze data. If there was ever a classic case of how the assumptions of scientists affected how they did their research, and what conclusions they came to, this is it. The scientists read students two different statements about the origin of the universe. One said that “the theories were strong and supported by the data,” and the other said the theories “raised more questions than they answered.” They were then required to do a word categorization task, while the words “science” and “God” were flashed intermittently (and too fast for the subjects to be consciously aware of.) And this is what they found:

… subjects who read the statement in support of the scientific theories responded more quickly to positive words appearing just after the word “science” than those who had read statements critical of the scientific theories. Similarly, those who read the statement suggesting that the scientific theories were weak were slower than the other group (who read the theory-supportive statement) to identify negative words that appeared after they were primed with the word “God.”

And the scientist says the following:

Preston says her research shows that a dual belief system, for instance the idea that evolution explains biology but God set the process in motion, does not exist in our brains. “We can only believe in one explanation at a time,”

Huh? Who comes up with this idiocy? Hard wired? Why couldn’t this be, for instance, a fairly straightforward demonstration of a set of cultural assumptions? And, of course, starting out with using only the words “God” and “science” and pairing them with strong vs. critical representations of scientific theories of origin is setting it all up to be oppositional and dualistic.

The second article was a report about a Vatican conference on Darwin, which had decided to add Intelligent Design to their agenda. And the article goes on to ask whether ID belongs at a Vatican conference on Darwin, and asks, in the headline, is it “culture or science?” Intelligent Design is nothing more than creationism in different clothes. There is nothing scientific about it. Both articles do the standard journalistic thing of setting science and religion against each other. The second article at least remembers to state that the official position of the Vatican is that “science and faith are compatible.”

Of course, the major culprits in this are not the journalists (they do play a role.) It’s the Young Earth creationists who insist on saying the universe is less than 10,000 years old, and all evolutionary science is either fraudulent or the work of satan, and the “new atheists,” like Richard Dawkins, who insist that the lack of evidence of God proves that God doesn’t exist.

Back to Stephen J. Gould for a moment. He  came up with something that makes a lot of sense to me. It’s called “Non Overlapping Magisteria.” It’s the idea, basically, that you don’t use the tools of one domain to look at the other. From Wikipedia:

In his book Rocks of Ages (1999), Gould put forward what he described as “a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to … the supposed conflict between science and religion.”He defines the term magisterium as “a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution” and the NOMA principle is “the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).”

In his view, “Science and religion do not glower at each other…[but] interdigitate in patterns of complex fingering, and at every fractal scale of self-similarity.”

On the right is my blogroll, that needs updating, but I thought I’d do some shout outs to blogs I’ve lately been loving and really learning a lot from, who are probably not on that list (yet).

• Wireframes Magazine – I’ve been doing Information Architecture for a very long time, now, but it’s great to learn new tricks and tools.
• Flowing Data – OK, I’ll fess up, I’m a data geek. And I love data visualizations, and ways to make data easily accessible. I am so envious of people with graphics skills who can do that well. There are a whole lot of really cool things here.
• RoughType by Nicholas Carr – really smart dude, really interesting stuff.
• ONE/Blog – ONE/Northwest never ceases to amaze me
• The Open Road – Matt Asay has some interesting insights from the Open Source biz world

Third to last in my series on CMS and CRM integration (next up, Joomla and Salesforce, followed by Drupal and Salesforce) is using web forms.

I wanted to talk about this because it is arguably the most common form of “integration” between CRM and CMS that’s out there (besides the manual kind). You’ve got a CMS, and you’ve got a CRM somewhere else, and you need some way for data from users to make it to your CRM. Of course, it’s not really integration – there is no sharing of data between the CMS and the CRM in any useful way. But webforms can really help you get things done. Here are some examples of things I’ve done and seen done:

• A custom donation page that’s sitting on a service like Network for Good that is linked from the website, or framed within it
• The HTML for a “Web to Lead” form from Salesforce.com pasted into a CMS page
• The HTML for a event registration form or donation form that goes to a hosted service

In the first option, the form isn’t hosted at all on your site. In this option you have the least control over look and feel – the vendor controls the look and the behavior. An example of this I’ve run into is when an organization uses Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge, and wants to have online donations via NetSolutions, their older (and much cheaper) “integration” tool. They provide a page, which hooks directly into the users RE installation. But you can’t customize the page in any useful way, so if you’ve just designed a brand-spanking new site, this page is gonna look like crap. (Luckily, at least Network For Good’s donation pages look snappy and nice, but are going to look a lot different than your website.)

The other options are much better for look and feel – you can take the HTML, and, in most instances, style it to look like your site. You can even sometimes include Javascript for validation or other functionality. But this is still strictly one-way communication – the form data goes directly to the service (and does not pass go.) You don’t get any of it.

This is a great start to integration, if your budget doesn’t allow for true, deep, two-way integration between CRM and CMS. And it’s a great way to get your feet wet in thinking about what you might want to do with CRM and CMS. And, in some instances, depending on both CRM and CMS, it might be your only option.

I came upon a stray tweet from someone I follow, which lead me on a search that led to an interesting blog entry asking “Why don’t Christians count the Omer?” Counting the Omer, if you don’t know, is a Jewish tradition of counting the 50 days between Passover (the liberation from slavery) and the holiday, Shavu’ot, which commemorates the giving of the Torah to the people of Israel. If you don’t know (I didn’t,) Shavu’ot and Pentecost are on the same day.

I find the parallels really fascinating. Passover - a celebration of liberation from slavery, and Shavu’ot, a celebration of God’s giving of the Torah. Holy Week and Easter, the commemoration of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and Pentecost, the commemoration of the coming of the Holy Spirit. Of course, it all makes a lot of sense. Jesus, and all of his earliest followers, were Jews, and lived and practiced that tradition.

In my long knowledge of Jewish tradition (having grown up in Great Neck, and having had many Jewish friends over the years) and my early seminary days of learning about the Hebrew Bible, and studying Kabbalah, I have always been struck by what is (besides the obvious) the major difference between Christianity and Judaism - orthodoxy vs. orthopraxy.

“The word orthodox, from Greek orthodoxos “having the right opinion,” from orthos (”right, true, straight”) + doxa (”opinion, praise”, related to dokein, “thinking”), is typically used to mean adhering to the accepted or traditional and established faith, especially in religion.” (From Wikipedia)

“Orthopraxy is a term derived from Greek (ὀρθοπραξις) meaning “correct action/activity”, and is a religion that places emphasis on conduct, both ethical and liturgical, as opposed to faith or grace etc.This contrasts with orthodoxy, emphasizing a correct belief, and ritualism, the use of rituals.” (From Wikipedia)

So why don’t we, as Christians, Count the Omer? Of course, this is a huge theological question - why have we, in large part, completely substituted practice with belief? In some corners (not so small) of Christianity, it doesn’t matter if you preach sinfulness of gays and lesbians while having gay sex (and repenting later,) beat your wife, focus on getting rich, or kill other human beings, as long as you believe what is considered “right” you’re, in that way of thinking, going to heaven. And no manner of right action or practice, whether it be nonviolence, love, compassion or ritual or contemplation, matters, if you don’t have the right beliefs. It seems really hard for me to imagine that the one, a Jew, who said things like “love your neighbor as yourself,” and lived the life of radical compassion and love that He did, would think that made a whole lot of sense.

Progressive Christians have begun the process of moving ourselves away from orthodoxy, but I do think sometimes we suffer some of the same symptoms. As long as people think like us, they get to be counted as part of us. Otherwise, they don’t. I think Christians need a lot more orthopraxy and a lot less orthodoxy of all kinds. What’s most important to me is how I behave, how I live, and how I live out, every day, my relationship with the One I call God. So from now until Shavu’ot/Pentecost, I’m Counting the Omer, in my own way.

I love Penguin Day. One of my favorite days of the year. Always comes right around NTC. This year, it’s before NTC, on Saturday, April 25. It’s a day dedicated to conversation and community around nonprofits and open source software. There’s some great stuff on the Agenda, like:

• Introduction to Free and Open Source Software
• Fundraising with all free software
• Free And Open Source Online Advocacy: Tools And Best Practices
• Making sense of Free and Open Source Content Management Systems
• Introduction to Blogging with Wordpress
• Intro and Advanced sessions on Joomla! and Drupal
• CiviCRM vs Salesforce.com: What Are the Differences?
• Mobile Volunteering: The ExtraOrdinaries Project
• Creative Commons And Open Content
• And many more…

You can register at Penguinday.org. Thanks to the generosity of Google, we’re delighted to grant fee waivers to anyone who needs one!

I look forward to seeing folks there.